Another incoming character, Downton Abbey‘s Rose Leslie plays Ygritte, who encounters Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) and the Night’s Watch as they head North of the Wall in Game Of Thrones Season 2, to find out what became of Snow’s uncle, Benjen Stark (Joseph Mawle).

“She’s a Wildling and she comes from north of The Wall,” explained Leslie to SciFiNow, “so she’s from the True North where it’s incredibly cold. She’s lots of fun, she’s level-headed and strong – very, very strong – and she has a lot of fun teasing Jon Snow.

“She gets a lot of entertainment out if him, she can’t understand him and she can’t work him out and she goes through a whole process of trying to work out who this boy is.”

As part of Jon Snow’s storyline, she was whisked to Iceland where the production was reduced to shooting in a narrow window of four hours daylight, thanks to the country’s polar winter.

“It was freezing!” exclaimed Leslie. “Every few days we’d be up there on a mountaintop and there’d be a blizzard, it’d be like -26!”